The Alcorn's and St John's Wood

Bruce and Jude Alcorn's with Lou &
Margot Salzman, current owners.

﻿The Alcorns as a family moved to St John’s Wood in 1953 from Nundah, father Ivan, mother Iris, and children Bruce, Jan and Judith. My father Rev. Ivan Alcorn was the Director of the Methodist Young People’s Department which meant that he was not supplied with a parsonage but had to find, secure and pay for his own housing. On Dad’s meager sa﻿lary and with﻿ his propensity to give our possessions and money away to needy causes, this was going to be a challenge.Ever the big thinker, he went to inspect a block of land on the corner of Glasgow St and Buckingham Street (1 Glasgow Street)which appealed mightily to him. One of his great obsessions was always to have a house on a hill and this block was all hill....granite at that. The land bordered the bush that stretched to the top of the mountain, and after a very convivial meeting with the owner at Granite House, Dad was hooked.

As he tells the story, he came home to my mother, saying he’d found the block of land he wanted but that they could not afford it. Then in true Old Testament style, that night he had a dream, woke my mother to tell her that in the dream the land would be given to them. And to use the biblical phrase...”and so it came to pass”.

Then came the struggle to build on this granite outcrop. Using a War Service Home loan Dad contracted with a friendly builder and the work of converting a granite outcrop to a building site began. This did not entirely succeed, and when granite boulders the size of a normal bedroom were encountered, the house design was changed to accommodate these monoliths. At that stage we had an inkling that landscaping may not be as easy as we first thought, but Dad was ever the optimist and besides, his teenage son could provide a ready, if unwilling, source of labour for the subsequent construction.

Thus for about two years we laboured to bust up granite rock and build retaining walls and terraces on the hillside which would rival the fabled rice terraces of Bali, (but without arable soil).

Dad quickly devised techniques for splitting granite and building walls which he learnt from Mr Glynn and Mr Colville, our nearest neighbours on that hill. However when the industrial pressure torch vessels he played on the rocks all night kept exploding, he devised another technique.

Every Friday afternoon he would collect old tyres from garages, pile them around the offending boulders, set them alight (the tyres that is) and keep the fires going flat out all night. At 4.30am he would summon his trusty teenage slave and together we’d see the dawn in by belting red hot granite boulders with sledge hammers. The granite would split off like razor sharp red hot skins of an onion, that we’d then pound into wall building size blocks. Oh the malicious laughter by the slave when the slave driver hopped around on one foot trying to get his boot off when a hot granite chip flew off the rock face into his footwear.

Most blokes in St John’s Wood would be familiar with these struggles with granite, but the higher up the mountain you lived, the more granite you had to tame to create any flat space for lawns. Eventually we built a retaining wall of some 100 metres or so which was up to two metres high. It’s still standing....as well as a double garage hacked out of a 3 m high granite-infested hill by hand tools alone.

This wasn’t the only natural phenomenon we battled. Just about every August when other kids were heading to the Ekka, we’d be battling the bushfires that swept down the mountain getting close enough to blister our paint work. After several wooden fences burnt down, Dad built a fence from steel and wire netting which would survive these annual events.We also had our own conflagrationary excitements on Guy Fawkes Day. One year we collected burnable scrap from houses in the Woods for weeks and built an enormous bonfire laced with old mattresses and the ubiquitous old tyres. The heat from this neighbourhood celebration was intense, and nothing ever grew on the bonfire site above our house for as long as we could remember.Other natural phenomena we experienced were the koalas in the back yard, death adders, and the odd dingo. All this wild life and we could still hear the clock strike in the city hall.Transport was somewhat sporadic, especially on Sundays, when as Minister’s kids we were expected to walk the long haul up the hill to the Methodist Church: not once but often three times a Sunday.

The non-geared bikes we had were too heavy to ride up the hill, so we generally walked to church and school. Occasionally you’d be lucky enough to grab the tail end of a truck going up the hill and be towed on your bike to the top. Helmets...what are they?My father also helped in the transport effort by regularly stopping and asking startled pedestrians or bus- stop- waiting commuters whether they’d like a lift. Some commuters learnt to rely on his offers.For our family, the Woods was a great place to grow up. It was a very welcoming community and we all seemed to know everyone else. Bob-a-job drives for Guides and Brownies were annual events without fear for the safety of the participants. All the mothers in Piddington Street watched out for pupils walking home from school to make sure we behaved ourselves. We were bound together by the smallness of the suburb, the shared experiences of the flooded bridge and the Saturday nights on the canvas seats of the Ambassador. We all lived a good life in The Woods, and my father died while visiting friends in the house on the corner of Piddington Street and Gresham Street. So for us it was also a fitting place for him to die I guess.

He loved the place. And so did we.Written by Bruce Alcorn, 2013INITIATION VIA BAMBOO
IN ST JOHN’S WOODThe supreme virility test of the pre-pubescent St John’s
Wood male always took place in the bamboo thickets lining Enoggera Creek.
In these secluded groves boys gathered every afternoon to
test their manhood in various ways.
First there were “The Tracks”.
In a pioneering
spirit worthy of their fathers’ Kokoda exploits, bike-owning boys carved tracks
through the bamboo and lantana scrub with machetes and then wore the resultant
dirt tracks to a smooth hard surface via the medium of riding bikes on them
until all the bumps had been worn off ....or the bikes collapsed.
(But bear in mind
bikes were made to stand a lot of punishment in those days, and the absence of
gears meant any boy could quickly repair one of these two ton monsters armed
only with the spanner that came in the tool bag affixed to the back of the seat
and two of the family’s dessert spoons ...for levering off a tyre of course.)
This pioneering track
making work entailed frequent charging at lantana bushes on bikes to widen the
track or smooth out some of the sharp turns. The pioneers were easily
identifiable by the resultant scratches over all legs and arms from this
activity
Once a track had been
worn through the scrub it was time to develop the roller-coaster tracks up and
down the steep hills the creek bank offered. These tracks were designed to take
the amateur rider unawares by suddenly turning a level bike track into a
precipitous drop and subsequent bone crunching steep ascent.
The aim of this exercise was to see who could get one of
these heavy bikes airborne during the drop-off and then recover for the hill
without endangering your future manhood via the horizontal bar on the bike when
you slipped off the seat or your pedals.
A particular hazard
was the upright metal light holder screwed to the front of the handlebars which
interrupted a forward catapult off the seat via a life threatening snagging of
the scrotum. (Thus younger boys would more often emerge unscathed from this
mishap.)
So, every afternoon, the youth of St John’s Wood gathered
and scorched around a network of tracks that to our boyish eyes were miles
long. I once took my mother to see these tracks and after she fell down one of
the roller coasters because of its steepness, she never visited again.....or
enquired further.
After a while boys became proficient in avoiding one another
on the narrow tracks and competed in races which made the tracks wider by
virtue of crashes into the lantana.
Then some bright spark decided the rides could be more
exciting if sound effects were added. A short husk of bamboo would be fitted
over the rear wheel with two tongues that protruded into the spokes. The
delight of this was that a bike under full steam would sound like a machine gun
going off as the tongues applauded their rider by slapping loudly against each
spoke. So the afternoons now had colour, light, movement and danger.
Fantastic!........(Or as a mate of mine who was a master of the embedded obscenity
used to say (”Fan-bloody-tastic”!)
The beauty of this
device then became apparent for off-track bike riding as well. Every Wednesday
at lunch-time a twenty strong throng of Woods boys on bikes would ride from
Ashgrove State School to Ithaca on bikes with these noise makers attached. The
noise we made coming down Coopers Camp Road has only just now been exceeded by rebel motor-cycle gangs.
The seclusion of the bamboo groves also allowed a wide
variety of other secret men’s business to be transacted. This included smoking,
fart lighting, airgun firing and on one memorable occasion a nude bike race.
The groves also provided excellent cover for the wide
ranging games of bedlam we played each lunchtime a t Ashgrove school. These
games include running for miles through the bush and sometimes the creek so
that often we’d be doing the post lunch classes in a state of sodden
exhaustion. I guess the teachers knew about this stuff but never seemed to
intervene. Wouldn’t happen now.
And what else? “What about sex?” I hear you ask.
Well this happened too... (of a sort). On one memorable
bedlam chase through the bush and bamboo, a clutch of us came upon a woman
swimming nude in the creek watched by her boyfriend (clothed) on the bank. As
he arose to chase us off she restrained him telling him they we just wanted to
look... and inviting us to do so. She then continued to frolic in the knee deep
water.
I think we went back to a geometry lesson that afternoon,
but strangely I don’t remember much of this.
Our other sexual adventures in the bamboo consisted of
suddenly surprising couples in parked cars and on several occasions throwing
stones at a flasher who seemed to like practicing his art on the creek banks. So that was the bamboos of St John’s Wood ¾ an evergreen thicket of
seclusion where boys became men and vice versa.
Beats playing computer games. Written by Bruce Alcorn, 2014﻿

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